How I Make My Photos Better by Removing Clutter
I am not an amazing photographer by any means, but I have learned some cool tricks along the way to make many of my photos much more interesting and much less full of distracting clutter. Photoshop has become one of my great friends in photography. And yes, I know in the age of digital photography doctoring your photos in Photoshop brings with it a lot of opinions. But I’m not talking about drastic changes that compromise the integrity of the original picture.
I’m talking about simply de-cluttering otherwise average photos and making them pop. Read on for an easy guide to clearing your photos of unwanted background clutter so that your subjects are the focus of your shots, like this photo from our vacation above.
The majority of my photography is of my daughter. Because of that, I have to be ready at a moment’s notice with my camera to capture her cute smile or a mischievous look. And because of the fleeting moods of a 10-month-old, I don’t always have time to frame the photo the way I’d like. (Smile. Snap. That’s usually how it goes.) So I have learned the value of post-production — shoot as many photos of a particular shot I want and then crop and clean up the best ones later in Photoshop.
Take this cute picture of my husband and daughter above, for instance. I absolutely love her smile in this photo and the way they are interacting. When I was looking for a great shot to put on a coffee mug for my husband’s Father’s Day gift, this was the one I loved. For just a regular snap shot, I could almost live with the extra clutter. But to be immortalized on a mug forever? I would definitely have to do something about that dude’s head and that big lamppost in the background.
How did I do that? Magic? No, it’s easy! Meet my friend, the amazing clone stamp tool in Photoshop, that has cleaned up and bolstered countless numbers of my otherwise average photos. To do this yourself simply choose a photo with unwanted background clutter. Next, open it in Photoshop and choose the Clone Stamp Tool (tool is circled to the left for your reference). Once you have the stamper selected, you can choose the brush size and also feather your brush if you want (i.e. blur the edges).
After you’ve got your tool set, the rest is easy. Simply figure out what in the background you want to get rid of and, while pressing down ALT on your computer with the stamp tool selected, click on a portion of the background that you want to use to replace the clutter, and then release ALT and click on the clutter to paste the copied background on top of it. Easy as that. You might have to experiment a little by clicking around and copying different sections of background here and there to make it all seem coherent.
See below for more examples of easy background clutter removal.
Just by removing the cars by Chris’ feet on the photo below, my husband and daughter are instantly whisked away into a remote and private rain forest, instead of the parking lot at a Hawaiian beach (and while it was a rain forest, it was not very remote!).
And by removing one person and part of a car in the upper right corner of the photo below, your whole focus is transferred to my husband and daughter. With the clutter left in the photo, your eye wants to figure out what that orange thing is and the rest of the cute shot is forgotten.
Good luck with your shooting, but remember — if you don’t get the great shot you wanted the first time around, it’s easy to try out the stamp tool in Photoshop to clean things up. Have fun!
Responses and Conversations
I, too, am a big fan of the clone stamp tool, especially when taking pictures of kids. If only the Diaper Geenie wasn’t in the background of her first time crawling… These shots are great, Amy. That’s one cute kid!
Comment by Stephanie Simpson on August 2nd, 2006 at 11:57 am
Thanks for this really nice tutorial- very helpful! I agree with Stephanie, she’s a cutie!
Comment by Randa Clay on August 7th, 2006 at 2:50 am
[...] I realized as I was looking over my post about removing unwanted clutter from photos, that most of my pictures are of everyone but me. Such is the life of a photographer, eh? I have a ton of great shots of my husband and the baby. And I’ll try a shot here and there by turning my little camera around and snapping us squished together (like the photo above), but those are never great because you can’t really set them up. And you by no means get any good background in those kinds of shots, much less everyone’s face in the photo! As you can tell, my baby is trying to scoot her way right out of this one. [...]
Comment by Shooting the Kids - » Moms, Get In The Picture! on August 9th, 2006 at 3:24 pm
[...] Amy’s talked about touching up the backgrounds of photos to remove visual clutter, usually using the clone tool to copy “clean” sections of the original image into the “cluttered” areas. This is a great technique and one that almost every photo can use, whether you’re removing lens dust or the kid making goofy faces behind your family shot on the beach. [...]
Comment by Shooting the Kids - » Extreme Background Touchup on November 11th, 2006 at 1:02 pm
This was the best to get rid of some unwanted clutter in my holiday card pic!
thank you!
Comment by Serena on December 4th, 2006 at 7:14 pm
Very cool Serena. Good luck with your photo projects!
Comment by Christopher Frazier on December 5th, 2006 at 8:47 am
Good work. I have been able to wipe out the “repeating feature” pattern by using more than one similar area in small bits and pieces. Also the blur tool helps to do that too. Once someone learns this clone-alteration technique, they are easily able to detect the repeating patterns and it really detracts from the picture. Contact me if you want to see some of the pics I’ve worked on and see how I’ve eliminated that from my projects.
Comment by jo rey on December 21st, 2006 at 10:12 pm
Another powerfull tool is in the box above the cloning tool. It works by analysing the pixels surrouding the blemish and filling a preselected area (where the blemish is) with similar ones. If you have a digital slr with dust particles on the sensor, this is the ideal way to go.
Comment by Leo Donkers on December 21st, 2006 at 11:53 pm
Jo – Using the clone tool really is an art. I’ve watched Amy start out with some photos that looked obviously edited, and then gradually learn how to “paint” using the existing elements of the photo. She’s rebuilt architectural features with the clone tool in ways that I’ve had a hard time telling that it was ever edited. But that’s taken some serious practice.
Pass on some links with your images!
Leo – The heal tool is great for dust, no doubt. I’ve tried to use the clone tool for dust and it works fine but is just overkill.
Comment by Christopher Frazier on December 22nd, 2006 at 10:12 am
Here is an example of some work I did for a friend. Sorry about the grainy picture quality; that’s just how the photo looked. The original has a fence in the background with power lines in the sky and the house had some marks on the roof and side of the house. One of the brothers had a cell phone clipped to his side also. The person who owned the pic asked me to hide the faces. Notice how there is no repeating features like in some of the photos on this page. If you look at the edited version, you would never guess it had been edited. Can’t trust photographs these days!
Comment by jo rey on December 22nd, 2006 at 10:51 am
And of course I forgot to insert the link to the photos. Duh me!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/59279507@N00/
It’s the ‘MyFourBrothers’ pictures.
Comment by jo rey on December 22nd, 2006 at 11:21 pm
I need to know if there is some way I can use my own photos I have taken and use them for a background. can you help me?
Comment by De on January 28th, 2007 at 4:18 pm
how do i get this? Because that is sooo cool????
Comment by Christie on August 25th, 2007 at 8:43 pm